Latest Contact Center Best Practices

Guest Post: 10 Ways to Use SugarCRM for Customer Service

As a Customer Success Manager, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to keep customers happy and productive with their products. The retention of current customers is fundamental to most businesses and quality customer service is at the core of facilitating that. Having a system in place to enable your team to provide excellent customer service is very important. Let’s look at how you can use SugarCRM for customer service:

1. Keep track of issues: In talking about customer retention, appropriately resolving customer issues is probably top on the list of ways to keep customers. By using the Cases module within Sugar, you can track and manage product or service related problems reported to you by your customers. This enables your customer service rep to follow up on open issues or the resolution of closed issues.

2. Stay organized: One of the biggest challenges for customer service agents is efficiently staying on top of a variety of activities. Sugar gives you the ability to log calls with the option of scheduling a follow up, schedule meetings, create tasks and sync emails. Simple, to the point, and effective.

3. Know what your customer wants: Delivering a personalized customer experience means more than just good marketing. If your customer calls are you able to assist them right away? By having all of their data readily available you can have a much more effective and helpful conversation…Whether it’s about an open Case, order placed, changing their address or purchasing a product. It also reinforces trust when the customer can see your company is organized.

4. Easily see which customers your teammates are working with: Customer service is all about communication. Sugar's Activity Stream provides a comprehensive list of important activities that your colleagues are performing in the system which allows you to stay in the loop without excessive emailing.

5. Future possible sales: Customer retention is one thing, but it’s also most company’s hope that they will be able to serve current customers with additional products, add ons, services, etc. By easily viewing past order information and dates a customer service rep can more naturally follow up on open quotes, possible upcoming orders, and products they have previously expressed interest in.

6. Keep the customer's experience personal: I spoke with a customer a couple months ago who was helping move his daughter off to college. He was going to be out of the office for a couple weeks but wanted to talk again when he was back. I scheduled a call reminder in Sugar to call him and made a note to ask about the move. Simple, easy and effective.

7. Understand if your customers are happy or unhappy: One of the coolest custom modules that my CEO developed for me is called “Feedback.” It gives me a place to input information about our performance or any issues or accolades – and it comes directly from the customer! So whether you create a custom module like we did or if you add in some fields to an existing module, capturing that data in a place where your entire team can view it is incredibly helpful.

8. Know what’s going on: Ever wonder if one of your team members replied to a customer’s request? You don’t need to. If you and your team are logging calls, emails, meetings and making notes within Sugar it’s easy to stay on top of requests and communication.

9. Do Reporting: Most people don’t enjoy the old school approach of creating or maintaining reports in an excel spreadsheet. It can be cumbersome to stay on top of updates and revisions. But rest assured: data stored within Sugar can be easily built into the reports of your choosing.

10. Schedule follow ups: Trying to remember who to call back or what you talked about is very difficult. Scheduling follow up calls or meetings in Outlook doesn’t allow you to have up to date customer information at your fingertips. By scheduling follow ups through Sugar you have quick and easy access (and a pop up reminder, if you so choose).

Faye Business Systems Group is an award winning Southern California-based technology consulting firm and Software Company specializing in CRM implementation with over 25 years of experience helping growing companies become more profitable through the effective use of technology.

Faye Business Systems Group is an award winning Southern California-based technology consulting firm and Software Company specializing in CRM implementation with over 25 years of experience helping growing companies become more profitable through the effective use of technology.